A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close.

In Tessa Hadley's stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.

Tessa Hadley is the author of four highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award; Everything Will Be All Right; The Master Bedroom; and The London Train; and a previous collection of stories, Sunstroke, a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Sunstroke and Other Stories

The Guardian

Sunstroke and Other Stories
by Tessa Hadley
154pp, Jonathan Cape, £11.99
Tessa Hadley may be a relatively new writer, but her prose manages a strange trick of pre-existence: from the very first line, it is as though you have known and liked her work for a very long time.